Women engagement in agriculture and human capital development in developing countries: An African sub-regional analysis

Considering the relevant role played by women in agriculture in Africa, this study sets out to examine how women’s engagement in agriculture contributes to human capital development in selected African countries. The study engagedpanel data of selected 33 African countries spanning the period of 2000 to 2019. The study applied the Pooled Ordinary Least Squares (POLS) and the fixed effects based on the Hausman specification. Findings show that engagement of women in agriculture, though significant, but negatively related to human capital development in Africa. The implication of this is that an increase in women’s engagement in agriculture without the required level of education and training and access to agricultural resources may have a negative impact on human capital development. Therefore, the study recommended that it is necessary to train women in terms of agricultural skills needed to improve human capital development in Africa.


Introduction
Women are often seen as the primary drivers of the development of national economies and local communities. This is because; women constitute more than 40% of the global share of the labour force in agriculture, which rises to more than 75% in sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries [1,2]. In SSA, rural households that are small-scale farmers contribute more than 75% of agricultural production [3,4]. This contribution is a result of the fact that women constitute the most significant proportion of the share of the labour force in agriculture. However, in most cases, these women have limited or closed access to land and credit and other productive resources [3][4][5].
Supporting women is a way of breaking the vicious cycle that leads to rural poverty and the expansion of slums in the cities [1,6]. In the same vein, to achieve the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs) of gender equality (SDG5), decent work and economic growth (SDG8) and reduced inequalities (SDG10), human capital and development strategies should consider women as a critical factor, by paying particular attention to their social skills both within and outside the agricultural sector [6,7]. The objective of this study is to investigate how women engage in agriculture contribute to human capital development in selected African countries. The rationale for this study is hinged on the fact that there are growing suggestions that what is important for development, more than natural resources and tangible assets, is the ability of persons to be efficient and productive economic agents, in summary, human capital. Against this backdrop, this study has taken a new direction, by examining how women's engagement in agriculture contributes to human capital development in Africa. This study's emphasis is on women because they play an important role in contributing to the growth of the agricultural sector, the impact of women cannot be underestimated as the proportion of women involved in agriculture is much. Therefore, it is pertinent to examine their contribution to agriculture.
The study estimated the impact of women in agriculture across Africa. In addition, the study account for the sub-regional impact of women's engagement in agriculture on human capital development, which to the best of the author's knowledge is spare in the literature. The study applied the pooled OLS and fixed effects and used human development indicators as a proxy for human capital development. This study is structured into five sections; following this introductory section is section two-the review of literature, section three is the methodology, results are presented and interpreted in section four, and section five is the summary and conclusion.

Literature review
In a systematic review of the literature, Asadullah and Kambhampati [8] critically assessed the relationship between the feminisation of farming, food security and female empowerment. Results from their review show that though female empowerment is a key driver of household food security, the engagement of women in farming so far does not serve as a means of empowerment. In other words, female engagement in farming fails to provide the necessary transformation of the lives of women, particularly in terms of empowerment. In a similar but methodologically different study, Yokying and Lambrecht [9] utilised the recursive bivariate Probit model to assess the relationship between land ownership and the gender gap of farmers in northern Ghana. The study found that though land ownership by women tends to increase women's agency, it does not reduce the gender inequality that exists in agriculture, both in decisions regarding cultivation as well as the use of agricultural earnings.
Drucza and Peverib [7] examined gender differential in agriculture in Pakistan and emphasised the wheat sector of agricultural productivity. The study applied descriptive and exploratory methods. Results from the study showed that irrespective of women's involvement in the production of wheat in Pakistan, they are still looked down upon when compared with their male counterparts. In another study, Akter et al. [10] employed the framework recommended by the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), 37 Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) were conducted among 290 women farmers across Myanmar, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines. The results contradict the conventional notion of gender inequality. Findings from Akter et al. [10] showed that in all four countries, women appear to have equal access to productive resources such as land and inputs, and greater control over household income than men. Against the findings by Akter et al. [10], in Nigeria, different findings were obtained by Obayelu et al. [1]. The study conducted by Obayelu et al. [1] examined the decision making of male and female households in Nigeria, using a survey of 1,747 farmers across 141 farming communities in Nigeria, using a multi-stage sampling technique. Findings showed that on average, the male had more educational qualifications than the female. In the same vein, maleheaded households owned more productive assets than female-headed households and earned a higher income. Also, female-headed households spent more time taking care of children, cooking and schooling than male-headed households. It can, therefore, be concluded that a gender gap exists in agricultural labour participation, with male playing more dominant roles than the female, which is against the findings by Akter et al. [7].
In another study, Folarin et al. [4] result informs the need to enhance the employment of female in the African economy for higher agricultural productivity. Therefore, the study suggested that policies geared towards female empowerment in agriculture and services alongside other concerned sectors should be promoted. In a similar way, Edafe et al. [3] examined how large-scale agricultural investments (LSAIs) affect employment outcomes of female households in Nigeria. It engages Wave 4 (2018/2019) of the Living Standards Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) dataset using the Propensity Score Matching (PSM) technique. The findings indicate that households in communities with LSAIs received higher wages and spend fewer hours in agricultural activities. Also, though female-head households spend more hours on agricultural activities than male-headed households, they earn less. Fig 1 shows women's engagement in agriculture (female employment, as a percentage (%) of total employment) across different developing regions and the world in general. From the figure, it shows that since the 1990s, the SSA region has had a relatively higher proportion of its female population in agriculture, compared to other regions of the world. In particular, between 1991 and 2005, an average of about 65% of the female population in the SSA region were engaged in the agricultural sector. However, since 2010, there has been a reduction in this number and currently standing at about 55%. This is compared to a reduction from 52%, 12%, 37% and 43% in 2010 to 24%, 7%, 22% and 28% in 2019 for EAP, LAC, MENA and the world, respectively. Fig 2 graphically represents the women's education (measured by female primary school enrolment as a percentage of gross enrolment ratio) for developing regions and the world. From the figure, it can be seen that the primary school enrolment of females from EAP, and LAC was over 100% between 1990 and 2018. However, for the SSA region, though it has experienced a continued increase over the years, rising from about 64% in 1990 to 96% between 2015 and 2018, it is still currently below 100%, reflecting the low level of female primary school enrolment in the region. Also, the evidence shows that overall, the percentage of females enrolled in primary schools in the world has witnessed a significant rise between 1990 and 2018.   However, contrary to the experience of the SSA region, the EAP and LAC regions can be said to have a high human development with an HDI score of 0.747 and 0.766 respectively in 2019. It is imperative to state that the LAC records the highest value of HDI among all the developing regions including that of the world.

Annual HDI growth of developing regions.
Whereas available data shows that the SSA region has the lowest value of HDI among the developing regions, Fig 4 shows that the annual growth of HDI has been highest in the SSA relative to the other regions since the 2000s.
In particular, the figure shows that while the HDI growth of SSA was 0.98% between 2010-2019, it was 0.92% in EAP, 0.44% in LAC and 0.59% for the world.

Theoretical framework
The theoretical framework of this study is based on the human capital theory based on the works of Schultz [11] as well as Sakamota and Kim [12] which posit that formal education is key to the improvement in the production capacity of any population. Further emphasis is placed on how education increases the productivity and efficiency of individuals by raising the cognitive stock of economically productive human capital which is products of innate abilities and investment in human beings David, David and Okolie [13]. In this regard, education is seen as a critical input for innovations and research and development activities which are necessary for the creation of new ideas for technological progress. Hence, suffice to say that female education is highly instrumental to their human capital development which is important to the growth and development process of the country.

Model specification
This section focuses on the specification of empirical model. Drawing insights from prior studies, such as Osabohien et al. [14], among others, the functional form of the model is given in Eq (1) Where, HCD means human capital development, the dependent variable. Similarly, WEA means women engagement in agriculture, and X 0 is a covariate of control variables, it represents entity and time, respectively. For i (i = 1, 2 . . . I) and t (t = 1, 2 . . . T). Eq (2) presents the explicit form of the model.
In Eq (2), φ is the constant term, ρ is the coefficient of women engagement in agriculture, γ is the coefficient of the covariates of control variables, γ(γ = 1, 2..N), and μ is the white noise. The covariate of the control variables is population of women (% percentage of total population), and women education (female primary school enrolment, percentage of total enrolment). Given this, such that X 0 it ¼ WPoP it; WEdu it the estimated model, in natural logarithm form, is given in Eq (3): The study adopted the Pooled Ordinary Least Squares (POLS) to analyse the data used in this study. The choice of POLS is due to the following reasons; the explanatory variables in this study's model are non-stochastic and strictly exogenous, the regression coefficients are the same for all observations, the error term is independently and identically distributed with zero mean and constant variance as well as the data normally distributed. In addition, the Fixed Effects (FE) model was employed because FE allows for heterogeneity among countries by allowing each country to have its own intercept value due to the fact that each cross-sectional unit may have some special features. Though there are other pane estimation techniques such as the generalised method of moments (GMM), among others; however, with GMM, the study may not be able to estimate the impact of women's engagement in agriculture at sub-regional levels. This is because, the GMM requires that the number of observations should be greater than the time. When that was disaggregated at sub-regional levels, in some regions, observation is less than the time.

Data source and measurement of variables
The study made use of data comprising of selected 33 African countries, presented in Table 1. The study employed four variables, which are-human capital development (HCD), the dependent variable, sourced from Human Development Index or Indicator (HDI). The control variables are women's engagement in agriculture (% of total employment), sourced from World Development Indicators of the World Bank; women's population (% of the total population), sourced from the World Development Indicators of the World Bank and women education (female primary school enrolment, % of gross enrolment ratio), sourced from the World Development Indicators (WDI) of the World Bank. The variables and their sources are presented in Table 1, alongside the countries and regions of study. Countries are selected based on income classification. They are lower-middle-income countries. Lower-middle-income countries are economies with a GNI perwithin in the range of $1,046 and $4,095, according to World Bank 2022 report [15].

Summary statistics
This section presents the descriptive statistics of variables and correlation analysis. The results obtained from the descriptive statistics are presented in Table 2. From the descriptive statistics (see Table 2) for the full sample, human capital development has a mean value of 0.24, which means that, on average, the select African countries have about a 42% rate of human capital development. Given the fact that there exists some heterogeneity across countries, it is necessary to run a regional analysis to observe this regional difference. This percentage for the full sample is quite similar across the sub-regional analysis. This is based on the fact that across sub-regions, the mean of human capital development ranges from 40 to 46%, Central and West Africa (42%), East Africa (41%), North Africa (46%) and Southern Africa (43%). Table 3 presents the estimates obtained from the POLS for the full sample and sub-regional analysis. Three variables were engaged in the analysis, which is female participation in  Results are consistent across sub-regions as female participation in agriculture tend to be negative in all the sub-regions, with West Africa the largest. Similar results are obtained for the female population across sub-regions (except in North Africa). It is observed that the female population is significant and negative in explaining the level of human capital development. The implication of this is that an increase in the female population without proper harnessing may negatively affect human capital development. But the result from North Africa showed that the female population is significant and positive in explaining the level of human capital development. The implication of this is that an increase in the female population when properly harnessed will positively affect human capital development. This means that women will positively boost human capital in North African countries. On the contrary, female education was found to be significant and positive in explaining the level of human capital development, which is in line with the 'a priori' expectation. The result showed that with respect to female education, a 1% increase in female education will lead to about 0.17% (full sample), 0.34% (Central Africa), 0.47% (East Africa), 8.6% (North Africa), 0.20% (Southern Africa and 0.48% (West Africa), increase in human capital development. For the full sample and across sub-regions, the F-statistic shows that female participation in agriculture, female education and female population are jointly significant in explaining the level of human capital in Africa, and the R-squared of above 0.5 shows that the model is well-fitted (See Table 3).

Fixed and random effects regression analysis
Based on the Hausman test, the fixed effect is preferred. Given this, only the fixed effect result is interpreted. The results for the full sub-sample and sub-regions using the fixed effect regression estimator are presented in Table 4, which is consistent with the POLS result presented in Table 3. Findings show that female participation in agriculture and the female population is significant and negative across sub-regions, while female education is significant and positive across sub-regions. The result shows that the output elasticity for female participation in agriculture shows the largest for North Africa (0.36%) followed by Central Africa (0.28%), with Southern and West Africa having the lowest percentage decline (0.01%). Concerning female education, on average, all things being equal, the coefficients are significant and positive across sub-regions. It means that a proportionate increase in female education, ceteris paribus, will increase human capital development by 0.43% (full sample), 0.32% in Central Africa, 0.45% in East Africa, 0.20% in North Africa, 0.22% in Southern Africa and 0.44% in West Africa.
Estimates from both the POLS and the fixed effects are consistent for the full sample and across sub-regions. From the result, it can be deduced that while female participation in agriculture and the female population is significant but negative in explaining the level of human capital development in Africa, education is significant and positive. This implies that an increase female population and participation in agriculture without the required education and training may have a negative impact on human capital development in Africa. Though the result obtained for female participation in agriculture is not in line with the 'a priori' expectation, but that of female education and population conforms to the 'a priori' expectation. The justification for the result is that female knowledge and skills through education, can facilitate human capital developmental progress.
The findings are in line with the findings by Obayelu et al. [1], Ju et al. [16] Drucza and Peverib [7] and but against the findings by Akter et al. [10]. Drucza and Peverib [7] used the descriptive statistics and found that despite the role of women involvement in the production  [1] found that on average, in Nigeria, the male has more educational opportunities and qualification than female. In the same vein, male-headed households own more productive assets than female and earned higher income, showing that gender inequality exists in agriculture. In this wise, as found in this study, increased female population and participation in agriculture, without education and training opportunities and skills development may have a negative effect on human capital development. Training of women to acquire skills is crucial to enhance their socio-economic status [17]. Also, akin to the findings by Abraham et al. [5], education as a human capital development component remains as one of the most important factors predicting women's participation in the formal sector. Interventions such as encouraging female education and retraining to enhance the development of human capital are required [5]. With respect to education as one of the most significant components of human capital as noted by Abraham et al. [5], in another study, find that institutions as well as an enabling institutional environment influence human capital development Africa.

Conclusion
This study examined women's engagement in agriculture and human capital development in 33 African countries for the period spanning 2000 and 2019. The study has become pertinent considering the vital role women play in the growth of the agricultural sector and by extension the economy of a nation. The results are consistent fully with the sample and across subregions analysis using the POLS and fixed effects. It showed that female participation in agriculture and population is statistically significant but negative in explaining the level of human capital development in Africa, while education is significant and positive in explaining the level of human capital.
The implication of the result is that an increase in the female population and participation in agriculture without the required education and training may have a negative impact on human capital development in Africa. In addition, this study found that the males are more educated than the females, therefore, there is a need to educate the girl child in order to bring her at per with her male child counterpart. This will help enhance their contribution to human capital development. This is because the increased female population and participation in agriculture, without education and training opportunities and skills development, may have a negative effect on human capital development.
Training women to acquire skills is crucial to enhance their socio-economic status and ensure that they contribute meaningfully to the growth of the selected sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. It is in the light of this that this study strongly suggests the governments of the African countries to provide free education at all levels (primary, secondary and tertiary) for girls so as to encourage them to go to school. This will make them to measure up to the educational standards of their male counterparts.
Closely linked to this is the fact that the governments of African countries should establish skill acquisition centres so that females can acquire skills that will help develop human capital. Furthermore, the study found that female participation in agriculture in agriculture is very crucial to the increase in agricultural output. Women will help to boost agricultural productivity because their participation in agriculture will help increase the population of those engaged in agriculture, this will in turn help to reduce hunger and poverty in Africa for the actualisation of the sustainable development goal of no poverty (SDG1), no hunger (SDG2), gender equality (SDG5), decent work and economic growth (SDG8) and reduced inequalities (SDG10).